A Beginner’s Guide to Salesforce Trailhead: Train and Retain Service Agents

A Beginner’s Guide to Salesforce Trailhead: Train and Retain Service Agents

In the last unit (five) of the Salesforce Trailhead module, “Salesforce Customer Service Strategies”, we learn all about how to train and retain service agents.

More specifically, Salesforce Trailhead covers …

The qualities that make good agents

Plans for training technical skills to agents

Plans to reduce turnover

Salesforce reminds us that customer service is made easier with advances in technology but also presents (potential) new obstacles and challenges for reps and customers alike.

Automation, bots, and online self-service, as Salesforce explains, make the customer experience more efficient, but some customers still want to talk to reps, so we must train and retain our customer service agents to keep all of our customers satisfied!

Salesforce recommends hiring for high character.

At Salesforce, the company’s number one value is trust. Therefore, it looks for agents that hold themselves to the same standard to build and maintain trust among customers.

Diversity is integral to Salesforce’s culture (AKA Ohana).

While hiring candidates who have similar values is crucial to the company’s success, technical experience is also essential.

Salesforce requires candidates to have high technical and emotional intelligence to actively handle all types of customer needs.

That’s why the company calls its contact center a success center because it aims to not only help customers succeed but its agents and organization as a collective too.

Certainly, we can reflect these strategies within our own organizations to drive success (including increasing customer satisfaction and increasing quality employee retention).

Next, we are reminded to train for technical experience. Reps should be trained as the technology evolves and new releases occur.

At Salesforce, for example, reps are expected to have base certification within 90 days of being hired and are trained for product readiness with each of the three new releases they put out annually.

Tackling turnover and showing agents opportunities are the last pieces of advice this module offers us.

At Salesforce, the company promotes a fun, family-like atmosphere while simultaneously focusing on giveback and volunteerism.

Relationship-building and personalization are also key to Salesforce’s high-value culture (and are part of the reasons why it’s often named one of the best places to work year after year).

Finally, Salesforce focuses on showing its customer service agents that they have a long future ahead of them at Salesforce with many opportunities to grow, diversity, and extend their roles.

Salesforce provides learning paths to employees to help them dive deeper and expand their horizons, whether they want to become certified at more advanced levels, or learn new functionality.

There are many routes they can take!

Discover what’s possible with Salesforce and the role of the customer service agent within and outside of the company utilizing the technology when you complete this module yourself.

Enjoy the last unit if you’ve been following along! There are many great takeaways.